Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Did Kylo Ren Try to Kill Luke Skywalker?

The new trailer would seem to fill in another detail regarding the massacre of Luke's Jedi students.

By
Scott Collura

"I've seen this raw strength only once before. It didn't scare me enough then. It does now."

When Luke Skywalker utters the above line in the new trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, director Rian Johnson trains his camera on two different things -- the "present day" where an aged Luke is clearly frightened by this strength he mentions, and the past where he falls to his knees, no doubt in horror, watching his new Jedi Academy burn. This is, of course, a return to the flashback of carnage glimpsed oh so briefly in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but this time around Johnson appears to be offering us a new clue about that event as well: It seems Kylo Ren also tried to murder Luke during that attack.

Ren, as we all know, is actually Ben Solo, the son of General Leia Organa and the late Han Solo. He's also the nephew of Luke Skywalker, and not surprisingly he was strong in the Force like his mother, uncle, and grandfather before him. And also like grandad -- Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader -- he fell to the Dark Side at a young age, betraying his fellow Jedi trainees in Luke's new Academy and killing them. This would earn Ren the name Jedi Killer in the First Order, and it is also the reason that Luke abandoned everything and went into exile on Ahch-To.

The apparent sequence of events of the massacre of Luke's Jedi students

In the new Last Jedi trailer, though, during Luke's above-mentioned dialogue, we see his mechanical hand reach out of the burning rubble of what is almost certainly the destroyed Jedi Academy. Sure, it could be that this is misdirection through clever editing, and that the shot of him climbing out of the wreckage takes place in a different scene in the film, but a tremor in the Force tells us that this is indeed Luke surviving the attack by Kylo Ren. Which would mean that not only did Ren kill all of Luke's Jedi students, but that he also tried to kill his uncle as well.

Of course, this is in keeping with Ren's methods. He killed his own father in The Force Awakens (tear), and the new trailer also seems to imply that he's out to kill his mother, Leia. This latter concept is particularly troubling, and again while it could just be clever trailer editing, it is at least a possibility that Carrie Fisher's character will not survive the events of The Last Jedi considering that the actress passed away after shooting this film.

But why? Is this all part of Kylo Ren's initiation into the Dark Side? That he must kill all that he once loved? That's really heavy stuff if so, taking the Dark Side of the Force to a new level that the previous films only flirted with (Anakin, for example, was portrayed as more of a victim of the Emperor's manipulation who was tricked into turning).

Whatever the case, it's clear that Luke is actually afraid of his nephew's power, and that's an aspect of the character that we've rarely seen before. And you know what they say. Fear is the path to the Dark Side...

We'll know more when Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits on December 15, 2017.